Hi everyone, welcome to my blog! I am a UK volunteer with voluntary service overseas and I'll be living in Rwanda in a small town called Nzige. Nzige is in Rwamagana district to the east of the country towards Tanzania.I'll be going out to Rwanda as an education volunteer to work on UNICEF's child friendly schools campaign. by teaching in a teacher training college and setting up a resource centre.

Sunday, 23 January 2011

I haggled for a spoon in Kinyarwanda

Today was our ‘rest day’ although it was anything but restful really. We went out to Kimironko market where my major achievement of the day was haggling for a wooden spoon in Kinyarwanda. I actually managed to say maganatatu na mirongwitanu (350) and someone understood me! The main difficulty I had was people automatically would say the price in Rwandan Francs in French because I am ‘umuzungu’ (white person) but my French numbers are not so great when you get into the hundreds and thousands...I always get my mille quatre-vingt-dixes mixed up!

We started our household shopping in earnest today and attracted quite a lot of attention when we carried our pillows and buckets and blankets and sheets around Kigali and tried to squeeze on a bus with it all...we must have looked quite odd...in fact I know we did because I have photographic evidence. Talking of photos I can’t seem to upload them onto my blog because the modem is slow as a snail. Trisha had told me something about ‘compression’ which I will try at some stage.

Tomorrow promises to be a busy day with the rest of our household shopping, Kinyarwanda, performance management and getting briefed on meeting our employers on Tuesday...its all about to start for real soon! Feeling excited, nervous, hopeful, anxious, but ready to get on with it now. It was the vso ‘family dinner’ last night where we got to meet all of the other current volunteers who were all lovely and I’ve been invited out next weekend which I’m really looking forward to.